Current situation in urban areas could be described by the cycle of urban decline. The choice of travelling by car produces more traffic jams, thus reducing the efficiency of public transport and the quality of live in urban districts by increasing pollution and accidents levels. Firms decide to move out to suburban areas where the provision of public transport is very low, and again people dec...

In the past two centuries, many American urban areas have experienced significant expansion in both populating and depopulating cities. The pursuit of bigger, faster, and more growth-oriented planning parallels a situation where municipal decline has also been recognized as a global epidemic. In recent decades many older industrial cities have experienced significant depopulation, job loss, eco...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to examine regional urban-rural differences in mortality from ischaemic heart disease, including sudden death of unknown cause (IHD/SUD) in Norway from 1966-89, for men and women aged 30-69 years. DESIGN Analysis was based on vital statistics. Regional mortality rates were obtained by aggregating the 443 municipalities in Norway into urban, rural, and intermediate m...

Urban ecosystems are carrying an extinction debt. Mitigating this debt will require the development of a predictive framework that improves our understanding of the factors causing decline of native biodiversity in urban areas. I argue that nitrogen is a common currency around which such a predictive framework could be built. I first summarise the evidence that shows the probable extent of nitr...

Coastal urbanization is rapidly expanding worldwide while its impacts on seaweed communities remain poorly understood. We assessed the impact of urbanization along an extensive latitudinal gradient encompassing three phycogeographical regions in the SW Atlantic. Human population density, number of dwellings, and terrestrial vegetation cover were determined for each survey area and correlated wi...

BACKGROUND Cebu has been one of the most leprosy endemic areas in the Philippines. Despite the high coverage rates of multiple drug therapy (MDT) and high BCG-vaccine coverage in children, leprosy control authorities believe that leprosy transmission and incidence (as evidence by continuing new case detection in both adults and children) have not declined as expected, once leprosy had been elim...

An urban growth model using stochastic cellular simulation was developed with motivation to understand the consequence of zone management policies in lowland cities. The model could integrate the growth, decline, spread, intensification, and protected areas of the urban growth into a single generalization of both the Eden and the p-models. Calibration strategy was demonstrated using historical ...

The House Sparrow is a globally distributed species and is closely associated with anthropised environments. They are well-adapted to urban life; therefore the decline of their populations in Europe represents an unexpected event that demands an investigation into its causes. Causes that have promoted this decline are not well-known, but one of the highlighted hypotheses is an increase of oxida...